Rachel Kneebone’s intricate works address and question the human condition: renewal, transformation, life cycles and the experience of inhabiting the body. Kneebone’s sculptures operate in a near-subliminal space, oscillating and blurring the boundaries between the conscious and the subconscious, the real and the imagined, everything and nothing. Working in porcelain, the material properties of her work further heighten and convey an awareness of opposing states, appearing to be not only heavy, solid and strong but also light, fragmentary and soft. This fluid movement between states is reflective of the wide range of art historical and literary sources that inform the artist’s practice. As Ali Smith has written, in Kneebone’s work ‘Michelangelo meets Angela Carter, the renaissance meets the contemporary, while the future simultaneously meets, melts, alters and fuses with the renaissance.’

In the work fragments of the human body multiply, merge and cascade down, unfurling around a complex tableau of organic and geometric forms. Again, to quote Ali Smith; ‘How do we make forms and simultaneously unmake them?’ The eye registers the multitude of twisting dissolving forms as ever-changing configurations. This creates a sense of constant flux that, as Elizabeth Neilson has commented, prompts the viewer’s focus to ‘swap between macro and micro in order to decode the action’, and undoes any notion of a singular narrative.

This sense of shifting modes of perception is amplified in both The Descent (2009) and 399 Days (2012-13), the two largest and most ambitious sculptures the artist has yet made. The works adopt a composite approach whereby sculpted ‘units’ combine to form large architectonic structures. In this transformative process, detail becomes ever more magnified and visceral. In The Descent forms spill and tumble into an abyss creating a sense of unease, even fear. 399 Days uses its own immense size to enact a dissolve of meaning and, simultaneously, its own complex form to express formlessness. As Darian Leader said:

‘The force field of 399 Days is built on this complex and contradictory directionality, and on the tension between form and fracture. Spherical shapes are distorted, cracked and collapsed by bodily sinews, torsos and limbs, as if the offer of a whole, complete form was being continually undermined.’